Jan Bergstra & Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
The notion of physical gender that we described in blog AGTRT-BF41 must prove itself in practice. Here we want to look at how physical gender can play a role in the discussion.
Read more about physical gender:
The concept of physical gender better captures the complexity of biological sex
Gender essentialism
For example, we can redefine gender essentialism (see blog AGTRT-BF22):
- Gender essentialism is the variant of formal gender theory that is based on the assumption that formal gender is the same as bodily gender.
This immediately reveals that gender essentialism depends on the meaning one assigns to bodily gender. And that dependency appears to be the case in practice as well.
As we described in blog AGTRT-BF19, this distinction is visible even within the Roman Catholic Church. In the Vatican, physical gender is understood as biological gender while the U.S. Confederation of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) still relies on morphological gender.
Gender-co-essentialism
Gender-co-essentialism (see AGTRT-BF16) is characterized by not assuming any logical or causal relationship between formal gender and bodily gender. There may still be a statistical relationship between the two notions but that relationship may shift over time. Gender co-essentialism makes gender identity decisive for gender assignment.
The definition of man and woman according to Alex Byrne
The gender critical philosopher Alex Byrne defined man and woman as follows (see also AGTRT-6):
- A woman is an Adult Human Female (AHF).
- A man is an Adult Human Male (AHM).
These claims can also be formulated with the new concept of bodily gender as follows:
- AHM: A man is an adult human person of male bodily gender.
- AHF: A woman is an adult human person of female bodily gender.
This interpretation of AHF and AHM makes the claim applicable to a range of conceptions of bodily gender. Byrne, in his article Are women adult human females? (2020) it is not clear what interpretation of bodily gender he has in mind. On the face of it, that is biological gender but it cannot be ruled out that he finds AHF and AHM also defensible if one has morphological gender in mind.
Gender theory: where does it start?
With the notion of bodily gender in hand, we know where formal gender theory “really” begins. This is exactly at the point where formal gender starts to diverge from physical gender. And so that is also at the point from which we believe Byrne’s claims about the definition of man and woman should be seen as false.
Great variety, but also great stability
The following descriptions of physical gender may be encountered (the list may not be exhaustive):
- Morphologically determined binary sex at birth,
- Morphologically determined sex at birth (neutral morphological sex also conceivable),
- Morphologically determined sex at birth (in case of ambiguity, the physician can therefore choose a conception of biological gender and thus decide the case),
- Morphologically determined sex (possibly modified during life and postoperatively),
- Biological sex according to the characteristics of chromosomes,
- Biological sex according to the structure/properties of gonads and gametes.
The use of physical gender can be further specified, if desired, by indicating exactly which of this description applies. An advantage of this is that the complexity exposed by the concept of bodily gender does not negatively affect formal gender theory.
The wide variation of interpretations of bodily gender does not imply that concerning the concept of bodily gender, concept engineering would also be at issue. In this sense, physical gender is a much more stable notion than formal gender.
Uniform theory description and development
When redescribing existing parts of gender theory, one option is to always use physical gender first when biological gender or biological sex was previously used, or when morphological sex was (usually implicitly) used. Then, when further specification of the variation mentioned above is needed, such information can be added (in the terminology suggested above).
Similarly, when developing new aspects of formal gender theory, an attempt can be made to use bodily gender as much as possible and to require further focus only when it is also necessary, as otherwise claims would arise that could not withstand the variation mentioned above.
TERF ideology (see also AGTRT-BF23) assumes bodily gender under the additional assumption that bodily gender is fixed at birth and can also be established shortly after birth.
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